


A Thousand Souls

by TheNightling



Category: The Sandman (Comics)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-01
Updated: 2020-02-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:21:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22509982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheNightling/pseuds/TheNightling
Summary: A very brief fiction written as a sort of experiment.  It's a little maudlin.   It's probably the only one I'll do for Sandman in first person perspective.
Kudos: 4





	A Thousand Souls

Disclaimer: This is a very different type of fan fiction from the first Sandman fan fiction I posted. This one will be from first person perspective. It’s very short but it should give you an idea of what is possible in the realms of fan fiction. Sandman belongs to DC / Vertigo comics and to Neil Gaiman.

___________________________ 

A thousand souls…  
It only takes a thousand…

There are rules to these things. This was wrong. This should not have been possible.  
That was the first coherent thought to come to me once the screaming died down within my skull. I could feel before I could see or hear. I could think before I could feel. It was cold. The cold was both new and yet also familiar all at once. It was like feeling the chill of winter for the first time, while still somehow remembering the sensation from long ago, and from elsewhere.  
Remember… Yes, remember…  
I try to recall who I am- what I am. I am so very tired…  
Someone is there in the darkness with me. I can hear him moving in front of me. He is me somehow. The haze had not yet left my mind but I somehow feel this is his fault. No. Someone else…  
There is sand on the ground. I can feel it between my fingers and it is around me. I am dusted in it. It is familiar and comforting. Remember. I blink. The tiredness, the weakness, it seems to be evaporating but a heavy weight remains. The weight is upon my very soul. I start to Remember. I don’t want to remember. Stop. I don’t want to remember.  
The weight was only growing. Pain gave way to anger. I tried to speak but my voice would not yet come. The bone-white hand reached down for me. Finally my voice came to me. I heard it bounce off the walls of the stone chamber.  
“…Why?”  
He did not answer.  
His slender hand caught mine and I was trembling as he pulled me to my feet. I do not think I could have stood on my own but I was not about to ask for assistance. As he clutched my hand with his own I felt his other hand on my back. I felt the soft texture of velvet-like material gaining substance and taking form. The texture and weight of my old robes. I let him dress me. I know how he saw me. I was a dark mirror of himself. Is that all I was to be now? His reflection? Someone’s Nightmare? …My own Nightmare?  
I looked into his face, a face I should never have seen- not with these eyes. Eyes so much like my own. I have never stared into my own eyes. There was pain there too but it didn’t seem as deep or as raw. It was fresh and sympathetic.  
The emerald that hung at his throat seemed illuminated in the darkness, glittering with the raw power of his… of our very soul. He was still holding me. I tried to pull away, to stand on my own but he clutched tighter, stubbornly and in defiance. I summoned what strength I had and tried to shove him. “Why?”  
He staggered slightly but recovered himself and caught my wrists before I could do anything else. “Why?” I had never heard hysteria in my own voice until that moment and it was alien to me. I felt something catching in my throat as if I was choking back on something. My knees started to buckle and I was slipping back to the floor but Daniel had me. He knelt there with me.  
“Why?” I could hear my own voice wavering.  
“They dreamt of you. I did not do this.” He said cooingly as if I was the child. I wanted to protest at the soft caressing- the hand stroking my own dark hair. How was it that he was so gentle? I had never been so… I shut my eyes as comprehension slowly came upon me. “They dreamt… of me…”  
“Yes.”  
“A thousand living souls…”  
“More than that.”  
I bowed my head, leaning against him. It hurt. It hurt to be alive. It hurt to remember. It hurt to feel. Everything hurt. Everything hurt save for the hand gently stroking at my head like I was his pet kitten. Finally I could feel the tremble in my own body. The heat of tears stinging my newly reconstructed eyes. I felt the heat on my face, the tears that I had never wanted anyone else to see. I wanted to be alone. I was alone. He was me after all. We are both Dream of The Endless after all or was I? Am I still Dream of The Endless? I wanted to be alone and yet I could not bear it.  
“No.” He answered my very thoughts. “You are not alone. I am here. I am with you. Welcome home… Morpheus...”  
I was trying and perhaps failing to hide my tears.  
I was so very grateful that he held me as if we truly were two entirely separate beings. I could never tell him how this felt, how terrible it was- how frightened I was. Surely he already knew. I hated him. I loved him. I was him. I needed him. In that moment I needed him more than I needed anything else.  
He was talking but it would take a long time for me to understand what I heard. I was reeling. It had all been for nothing.  
His voice was calm, soothing. “That is the nature of Dreams. Where there is Hope an old Dream might live again.”  
I saw a child in my mind. A little girl. What did this mean?  
One thing was certain, I was going to live. But things were different now. I was different. He was different. And as he held me the pain did not seem so terrible.  
Daniel held me and I could hear the unfamiliar sound of my own sobs…

The End.


End file.
